Shark Teeth

My luck started to change the day I opened the front door and a bird flew into the living room. It was one of those little black birds that nobody finds attractive, a grackle or a starling, and its extreme agitation made it even less so. It ricocheted from floor to wall, clattering with such momentum against the picture window that I feared it was going to maim itself. Feathers floated to the carpet. I circled around it at a respectful distance, hoping to induce it to fly out the way it had so blithely entered, but whether it was made stupid by panic or it was, indeed, a birdbrain, it kept repeatedly flinging itself against the picture window, so I gave up. I propped the front door open and went to my computer to look for strategies to avoid the worst outcome regarding my taxes.

For several years, perhaps a decade, I have not paid them. A month ago I got a courtesy note (euphemism) from the IRS. I scrambled, stuffed some bank statements and receipts into a Grocery Outlet bag and paid a visit to my accountant Steve.

Steve is crusty and decrepit, but he still is a bloodhound when it come to sniffing out financial hidey-holes. Short of the penitentiary, he advised there was no recourse but to pay the fine and the back taxes. For the first time I became suspicious of his acumen, and even more suspicious of his motives. There was something hostile in the way he tapped his knuckly digits on his keyboard, and his smirk in informing me of the amount owed was unsavory. Really, did I expect that somebody who steeped his life in numbers and dollar signs would stay unimpeachable?

I am a good citizen. I didn’t pay my taxes, not out of civic irresponsibility, but because I didn’t have the disposable dough. I would have had the dough but I have, make that had, a gambling issue. On-line poker. If you’ve tried it, you won’t judge me. Back in the day I won with some regularity. Nowadays there is an app-assisted armada of barracudas in every pool, and before you know it, you’re stripped to bones. It doesn’t take a genius to know when to fold ’em. Or maybe it does. I hung in too long.

It was incumbent to find a source of income. In my neighborhood there’s always some job to be done, painting someone’s fence, taking out someone’s trash, loving up a widow here and there. Last resorts, and poor ones at that, belittling in different ways, and light on lucre. Fantasy filled the void of actual prospects. I saw flyers and posters on trees and buildings offering an extravagant reward for the return of a darling pooch and I began to fantasize about stealing a Shih Tzu or two. I would have to be cunning. I have the advantage of having an unbesmirched reputation. People think I am a little strange, but nobody would expect me of masterminding a pet-napping or anything else.

Pet-napping is not something you can plan, in any case. Perhaps if the opportunity arose, if somebody left their little chow-chow in the Tundra while they went shopping at Bi-Rite, well maybe. I picture the mutt viciously chomping on my fingers before I get it muffled in a thick blanket. But why would I be carrying a thick blanket around?

I considered other animals, eliminating cats immediately. You try to catch one. They know your intentions.

The day the black bird flew into my house I was in a slough of despond, without the wavelength to fret about the freaked out creature in my living room. I forgot about it entirely, until later in the morning I went back into the living room and was startled by it lifting off the armoire. It had learned enough to stop hurling itself against the window. It settled back upon the armoire. It seemed entirely more equanimous. Perhaps it was concussed. I slowly sat down on the couch, and except for a slight reactive hop, it stayed still, its ebony eye fixed on me. We began a stare-down, a telepathic one. I let it know it could stay as long as it wanted, but if it wanted to go, the door was open. It nodded and immediately flew down the hall and out the front door, as if it knew where the exit was the whole time, that its panic was a pantomime with a moral. I thought about it. I thought about birds in general, how they are descendants of dinosaurs, and then about fossils and suddenly I remembered the necklace that has been sequestered in a closet since I bought it from a drugged-out hippie back in the 70’s. It is made of shells and the teeth of the megalodon shark. It occurred to me that megalodon teeth might be worth something and sure enough, after googling, calculated that if I sold them wisely they would take a megalodon-size bite out of my IRS arrears. I retrieved the necklace and was jubilant to discover there were twice as many teeth as I remembered, twelve in all.

I put the necklace on. It was impressively grisly, even more so after I took my shirt off. Time has done a number on my body, but I still like the look of it, especially wearing the necklace.

I wasn’t quite ready to give it up. It was money in the bank. I had a better idea. Keeping the necklace on, I slipped into a pair of pajama bottoms and my ancient cowboy boots, and took my guitar down to the subway station. For the rest of the afternoon I busked, playing “Imagine” over and over, which is the only thing I can play that’s recognizable. I made over three hundred dollars. One hundred bucks an hour. I’m busking a different station tomorrow.